My practice treats storytelling as a know in reality, seemingly small and defined, but dense and labyrinthine—my books and works on paper require close attention to be traced and intuitively understood.

Rooted in printmaking, graphic design, and literary criticism, my storytelling pulls together a variety of structures and materials: rhythmic, gestural aspects of comics, such as panel transitions, simple iconography, and special relationships of word and picture; poetic, iterative, and adapted writing and images; and conceptually driven forms that shape the audience’s experience. The resulting narratives are figurative, often non-linear studies of the role of language in how we form perceptions and understand the self, its hidden parts and possibilities, and its connections to others.

My practice still has echoes of my BA thesis on Virginia Woolf and the relationship between reader and book—what intimacy looks like when the self, like a story, is a complicated knot, something that can never be completely articulated and known, defined as it is both by itself and by external interactions. In my work, characters are often alienated, distant, or inscrutable because of a struggle to communicate what is essentially inexpressible. Instead, to lead the reader to the inexpressible thing, my work adapts, repurposes, or reimagines language, for example as obscure symbols, partial or oblique dialogues, and derivations of existing texts, for the reader’s interpretation.

I approach viewership as reading, itself an act of inhabiting liminal spaces, connective gaps between fragmented events, between gesture and understanding, between experience and fiction, between material and meaning. Often in my book works, sparse text and elusive images present traces of a story for the reader to follow. More recently, I have focused on parallels between comics and poetry in structure, evocative capabilities, and iterative creative process, and on using source material in my storytelling. It has pushed how my work shifts the reader between concrete and abstract, entangles reality and imagination, and invites the reader to intuit a whole from disjointed visual and textual pieces. A recent book Enchiridion, for example, imagines the actress Cate Blanchett as a figure between fixed reality and infinite possibility, through an amalgam of manipulated and original imagery, language tropes related to mythology and worship, and motifs repeating across four separate narratives.

What isn’t expressed is as important for me as what is, and I am always investigating ways to engage audiences in meaning-making through fragments of story. The work I make offer glimpses of something intangible that takes its clearest shape in the viewer-as-reader’s mind; reading completes the work, even as it offers multiple possibilities in interpretation.

brute-works.com, @meanwhile_alex